A Google Santa Tracker update from Santa's Elves

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Today, we're announcing that the open source version of Google's Santa Tracker
has been updated with the Android and web experiences that ran in December 2015.
We extended, enhanced and upgraded our code, and you can see how we used our
developer products - including Firebase and Polymer - to build a fun,
educational and engaging experience.

To get started, you can check out the code on GitHub at google/santa-tracker-web
and google/santa-tracker-android.
Both repositories include instructions so you can build your own version.
Santa Tracker isn’t just about watching Santa’s progress as he delivers presents
on December 24. Visitors can also have fun with the winter-inspired experiences,
games and educational content by exploring Santa's Village while Santa prepares
for his big journey throughout the holidays.
Below is a summary of what we’ve released as open source.

Android app

The Santa Tracker Android app is a single APK, supporting all devices, such
as phones, tablets and TVs, running Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) and up. The source
code for the app can be found here.

Santa’s
Village is a launcher for videos, games and the tracker that responds well
to multiple devices such as phones and tablets. There's even an alternative
launcher based on the Leanback user interface for Android TVs.

Games on Santa Tracker Android are built using many technologies such as JBox2D (gumball
game), Android view hierarchy (memory
match game) and OpenGL with special rendering engine (jetpack
game). We've also included a holiday-themed variation of Pie Noon, a fun game that works on
Android TV, your phone, and inside Google Cardboard's VR.

Android Wear

The custom watch faces on Android Wear provide a personalized touch. Having
Santa or one of his friendly elves tell the time brings a smile to all. Building custom watch
faces is a lot of fun but providing a performant, battery friendly watch
face requires certain
considerations. The watch face source code can be found here.

On the web

Santa Tracker is mobile-first: this year's experience was built for the
mobile web, including an amazing brand new, interactive - yet fully responsive,
village: with three breakpoints, touch gesture support and support for the Web
App Manifest.

To help us develop Santa at scale, we've upgraded to Polymer 1.0+. Santa Tracker's use of
Polymer demonstrates how easy it is to package code into reusable components.
Every house
in Santa's Village is a custom element, only loaded when needed, minimizing the
startup cost of Santa Tracker.

We simplified the Chromecast support this year, focusing on a great
screensaver that would countdown to the big event on December 24th - and
occasionally autoplay some of the greatvideocontent from around
Santa's Village.

We hope that this update inspires you to make your own magical experiences based
on all the interesting and exciting components that came together to make Santa
Tracker!